The Rick Larsen Campaign recently launched a new line of attack on John Koster by attempting to mislead voters about the actual meaning of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. The goal of the Pledge is to protect taxpayers and businesses from tax increases. The Larsen campaign’s charges follow the patently false claims made by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) earlier in the year – claims that the non-partisan FactCheck.org agrees are “blatantly false.”

The “No New Taxes” Pledge commits a signer to “oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses and oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates.” By making this promise, Koster has taken tax hikes off the table for all taxpayers in Washington- something Rick Larsen has not done.

This is not the first time Democrats have tried to misrepresent the meaning of the Pledge. During the special election in HI-01, the DCCC ran misleading attack ads against the Pledge. FactCheck.org, a non-partisan "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics, responded by condemning the DCCC and agreeing that the ads were “blatantly false.”

Similar claims about the Pledge were made recently in Michigan and Nevada. In Michigan, the Jackson Citizen-Patriot, a Jackson, Michigan newspaper, deemed Rep. Mark Schauer’s claims about the Taxpayer Protection Pledge and Tim Walberg to be “not true.” In Nevada, Jon Ralston of Face to Face and the Las Vegas Review-Journal “reality checked” the Dina Titus campaign ad and found the claims made about the “no new taxes” Pledge to be “thoroughly misleading.”